It was the most moving experience I’ve had as a writer. Or stories about undergoing some sort of painful transformation. Stories of leaving a marriage or leaving a religion. The essay was widely shared and my inbox was flooded with emails, from family and friends, of course, but mostly from strangers - men and women, old and young, from all religious backgrounds, who wanted to share their stories with me. This ceremony marked the end of my willingness to stay inside a religious way of life in which I didn’t sufficiently believe. In the essay, I wrote about how, as I followed the minute details of this ancient and highly regulated ceremony, I came to understand that I was leaving not just a marriage but the religious world that had shaped me. What was your motivation or inspiration in writing your memoir?Ī few years ago, I wrote an essay for the New York Times about my experience of having an Orthodox Jewish divorce ceremony. Honest and courageous, Tova takes us through her first year outside her marriage and community as she learns to silence her fears and seek adventure on her own path to happiness. To free the part of yourself that has been suppressed, even if it means walking away from the only life you’ve ever known.
This is a memoir about what it means to decide to heed your inner compass at long last. This will mean forging a new way of life not just for herself, but for her children, who are struggling with what the divorce and her new status as “not Orthodox” mean for them.
After years of trying to silence the voice inside her that said she did not agree, did not fit in, did not believe, she strikes out on her own to discover what she does believe and who she really is. Even though it would mean the loss of her friends, her community, and possibly even her family, Tova decides to leave her husband and her faith.
She married a man from within the fold and quickly began a family.īut over the years, her doubts became noisier than her faith, and at age forty she could no longer breathe in what had become a suffocating existence. After all, to observe was to be accepted and to be accepted was to be loved. Born and raised in a tight-knit Orthodox Jewish family, Tova Mirvis committed herself to observing the rules and rituals prescribed by this way of life.
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